Shelby Oaks arrives carrying the weight of expectation that inevitably accompanies a passion project years in the making. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, the film positions itself at the crossroads of found-footage horror, investigative mystery, and internet-age urban legend—a convergence that has produced some of the genre’s most enduring works. Unfortunately, Shelby Oaks doesn’t synthesise these influences so much as stack them on top of one another, resulting in a film that is ambitious in intent but disastrously unfocused in execution.

The central hook is a familiar one: the disappearance of Riley Brennan and her sister’s increasingly obsessive attempt to uncover what happened. On paper, it’s a solid spine—personal stakes fused with creeping dread. In practice, the film never decides what kind of horror story it wants to tell. It borrows liberally from the breadcrumb-style investigation of The Blair Witch Project, the faux-documentary escalation of Lake Mungo, the cursed-media mythology of Sinister, and the online-conspiracy aesthetics of The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Rather than coalescing into something cohesive, these elements clash, constantly resetting the tone and momentum.

The found-footage framework, already a precarious format, becomes especially unwieldy here. The film toggles between mockumentary interviews, handheld investigation, archival clips, and conventional narrative scenes without any clear internal logic. What should feel immersive instead feels arbitrarily assembled, as though the film were endlessly re-editing itself in search of an identity it never quite finds. Tension dissipates not because the scares fail, but because the narrative keeps stopping to reinvent its own rules.

Worse still, the mystery at the film’s core grows less compelling the more it is elaborated. Each new revelation muddies the waters rather than deepening the dread, until the supernatural threat becomes a vaguely defined catch-all evil—more concept than presence. The obsession that should drive the story forward instead mirrors the film’s own fixation on referencing better works, mistaking accumulation for escalation.

To Stuckmann’s credit, Shelby Oaks is not without flashes of promise. A handful of isolated sequences suggest a filmmaker with a genuine affection for the genre and an understanding of its visual grammar. But affection alone is not authorship. Without discipline, restraint, or a unifying vision, the film collapses under the weight of its influences.

The Prognosis:

Shelby Oaks feels less like a horror film than a collage—an anxious attempt to be every successful found-footage mystery at once, and in doing so, failing to be anything at all. What begins as a missing-person story ends as a noisy, overextended hot mess, its sense of dread smothered by its own excess.

• Saul Muerte